ALGIERS, 25 November 2005 — People of Algeria’s two northern Kabylie provinces, the home of many of the country’s substantial Berber minority, voted yesterday in polls for their local councils and parliaments that were dissolved in July. Some 1,137,000 people are registered to vote in Kabylie, where the main towns, Bejaia and Tizi Ouzou, are the administrative seats of the adjoining smaller and larger provinces 110 and 260 kilometers east of the coastal capital.
The election is for 90 members of the provincial assemblies in each town, which were dissolved by the Algiers government in July, and for 131 local councils.
When the last poll for assemblies of the mainly poor, highland provinces were held at the end of 2002 the outcome was strongly contested. In some areas the opposition called for a boycott and turnout was less than one percent.
The Berbers are the indigenous inhabitants of the North African country and have waged a campaign against successive Arabic-speaking governments in Algiers for recognition of their language and culture as well as economic investment.
President Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s government struck a deal with influential traditional Berber tribal leaders, the a’archs, to dissolve the assemblies because local people regarded them as unjustly put in place.
Voting was slow early yesterday amid icy rain, officials said, but turnout was expected to be generally much higher than in last September’s referendum on a national reconciliation charter drawn up by Bouteflika.
